Homebrew has made extensive use of GitHub to expand the support of several packages through user contributions. In 2010, Homebrew was the third-most-forked repository on GitHub.[5] In 2012, Homebrew had the largest number of new contributors on GitHub.[6] In 2013, Homebrew had both the largest number of contributors and issues closed of any project on GitHub.[7]

Homebrew has spawned several sub-projects such as Linuxbrew, which is a Linuxport,[8] Homebrew Cask, which builds upon Homebrew and focuses on the installation of GUI applications,[9] and "taps" dedicated to specific areas or programming languages like PHP.[10]

Contents

Homebrew was written by Max Howell in 2009.[11] In March 2013, Homebrew successfully completed a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for servers to test and build formulae and managed to raise £14,859.[12] On December 13, 2013, the Homebrew repository migrated from Howell's GitHub account to its own project account.[13] In February 2015, due to downtime at SourceForge which resulted in binaries being unavailable, Homebrew moved their hosting to bintray.[14] As of July 2016, Homebrew is maintained by a team of 12 developers.[15]

Homebrew is written in the Ruby programming language and targets the version of Ruby that comes installed with the macOS operating system. It is by default installed into /usr/local and consists of a git repository, allowing the user to update Homebrew by pulling an updated repository from GitHub. The package manager builds software from source using "formulae", Ruby scripts constructed with Homebrew's domain specific language (DSL) for managing dependencies, downloading source files, and configuring and compiling software. Binary packages called "bottles" provide pre-built formulae with default options.

Homebrew does not honor the default privileges of /usr/local; directory ownership is changed from root with group permissions for the wheel group to the installing user and the "admin" group. All files, not just the directories, have their ownership changed by the installer. Output from the installer: